In Just Call Me Lady: A Work of Completion, Mandy Goodhandy, also known as Amanda Taylor, invites readers into a life that defies categories, bends expectations, and reclaims identity on fiercely honest terms. More than a memoir of gender transition, this is a book about the reclamation of self, the art of survival, and the healing power of finally letting the little girl inside come out and live in the light.
While many transgender memoirs focus on the arc from “before” to “after,” Goodhandy reshapes the narrative.
This is not a transition story in the conventional sense. “I don’t see this as a transition,” she says in an interview with The Heroines of My Life. “It’s a story of completion. Of finally becoming the whole person I was always meant to be.”
That redefinition is at the heart of the book’s title and its soul: Just Call Me Lady. With candor, dark humor, and theatrical flair, Goodhandy recounts a life shaped by forced performances, moments of revelation, and a relentless search for truth in a society that demanded silence.
Born in Scotland, Mandy was, as she puts it, “a little girl who had to act like a boy to survive.” Mainstream society provided her with no scripts, no vocabulary, no space to simply be. And so she did what many children do when their authenticity is dangerous, she learned to act.
Goodhandy describes her early life as an Oscar-worthy performance, playing the part of a boy and, later, a man. But the cost of that performance was steep. She was bullied in school, ostracized, and conditioned to believe that femininity was something shameful, something she must bury deep.
And yet, buried seeds often bloom. The memoir walks us through her evolution with vivid, sometimes painful honesty, sea cadet training, college years, work as a camp counselor, roles in musical theatre, and time spent in Toronto’s LGBTQ+ nightlife scene. It was through drag, sex work, cabaret, and comedy that Mandy began reclaiming the feminine power that society once told her to deny.
What makes Just Call Me Lady stand out among memoirs is not just the remarkable life events Mandy describes, it’s the tone with which she tells them. The writing is raw, cheeky, sometimes bruising, sometimes hilarious. One moment she’s recounting the humiliation of being forced into masculine roles, the next she’s cracking a joke about high heels and head games in the world of drag.
Goodhandy doesn’t skip chapters. She includes them all, the messy ones, the sexy ones, the painful ones. As a male stripper, she explored masculinity from the inside.
As a sex worker and entertainment agent, she understood power and objectification from many angles. And as a transgender advocate, she transformed her experience into activism and community-building.
Each role she played, on stage and off, became another thread in her tapestry of self. They were not masks but mirrors, reflecting parts of her identity back at her until she could finally stop performing and simply live.
Perhaps the most moving aspect of the memoir is the theme of forgiveness, particularly self-forgiveness. Mandy doesn’t just survive her past; she honors it. She stops blaming herself for “playing a character” and instead offers compassion to the child she once was, the teen she had to become, and the adult who made the best decisions she could under impossible pressure.
In her Heroines of My Life interview, she says, “I forgave myself for allowing society to force me into living a life that wasn’t mine. But I also thank that version of me. He got me through until I could be me.”
This compassionate view of her former selves, rather than a rejection of them, is what gives the book its emotional weight. It is a journey from erasure to wholeness. And it’s told with the kind of fierce love and audacious humour that could only come from someone who has learned to laugh while dancing through fire.
For young transgender and queer people, Just Call Me Lady offers more than a peek into another person’s life. It’s a mirror, a map, and a message: You are not alone. You are not broken. And your story, no matter how messy, is worthy of being told.
Whether she's detailing the exhaustion of living under constant societal misgendering or the catharsis of finding joy in a glitter-covered drag show, Mandy offers life messages without preaching. Her voice is grounded, mischievous, and maternal all at once. She knows what it feels like to not feel “complete,” and she wrote this book for anyone who has ever felt unfinished or unseen.
There’s a moment in the memoir when Mandy talks about finally allowing the little girl inside her to live again. That moment isn’t framed as a medical transition, or a costume change, or a political act. It’s something simpler, deeper: “I finally said yes to myself.”
And in saying yes, she gave others permission to do the same.
Her story is not sanitized. It’s real, and it’s often uncomfortable. But what shines through is a profound sense of liberation, not from gender roles, or shame, or the patriarchy, but from the silence that once bound her.
Just Call Me Lady is the sound of a woman coming home to herself. It is, as Mandy says, “a work of completion.” And in that completeness, she offers a gift to readers: the audacity to be whole.
Available via Amazon
Photo via Heroines of My Life
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